International Borders: Online Games Create a Shared Global Culture

Posted on Fri 31 Jul 2009 by Keira Peney under Community , Other .
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Cultures clash sometimes. Put two people in a room, one who thinks long beards are divine, and the other who thinks they are sinful, and you’ll have a generational war before you blink twice. People have clashed over everything from skin colour to the way they eat. Got a sacred animal? The next tribe over will slaughter it and have it for dinner.

So when you create a truly international forum, you can expect misunderstanding and conflict to spring up. Unfortuantely, the only way to progress to a deeper understanding of other people is to interact with them. Somehow, we have to create a place that allows us to see past the immediate ‘wow, look at how different they are’, and observe that everybody thinks, breathes, feels, loves and despairs.

Enter online games.

Firstly, online games give you an avatar. You can be anyone you want - and lots of people want to be exotic. Different. Skin colour can be white, black, gold, pink, blue, or a rainbow motley. You can be tall, short, a dragon, a patchwork bear, or a giraffe. Your back story can be fantastical, mundane, or non-existent. You can explore everything that is taboo in a safe (or safer) environment.

And you can do all that with people from a completely alien background to you.

The problems? Well, language for one. The English speaking world will remain forever shut-off from those who do not speak English, and the Chinese reading world will remain a mystery always to those who don’t read Chinese. Even where a second language is spoken, subtleties of meaning may well be lost.

The second problem? Server borders! The fact that when I play World of Warcraft I cannot play with both my friends from the USA and my friends from the UK at the same time is truly frustrating, and one of the reasons I eventually quit. Luckily, this is not so much an issue with console games, but nonetheless, geographical borders need to be rescinded in online communities.

My solution to the first problem? Well, the radical one would be to get every online game Esperanto only, but I can’t see that happening. The other is to improve automatic translators - get them to a level where people can type in one language and everyone can read it in their own (is it so far away?)

Anyway, these two problems aside, video games are an excellent place to create a truly global culture. Events in MMO’s become historical, and in-game celebrations and holidays are familiar enough to be welcoming and different enough to work for everyone. Combating an imaginary evil is a great way to draw disparate groups together, and I would far rather we worked together to overcome the Undead, than we work together to overcome [insert current real country of 'Evil' here].

Of course, peace would not be around the corner. But, much like football tournaments and the Olympic games, competition would be channelled into something other than missiles. Which country has a first class raiding group, for example, or into long-running PVP tournaments.

Just a fantasy? Or will this - combined with lots of other factors - really make a difference in how we perceive each other?